More than a year ago I wrote about .NET Frameworks, CLRs and Visual Studio add-ins, where I explained that the new CLR 4.0 can coexist (for the first time in .NET) with a different CLR (2.0) in the same Windows process, and ended that post with the following question: If I compile a Visual Studio […]

Comments Off on Visual Studio 2010, CLRs 4.0 and 2.0, and add-ins | Other | Permalink Posted by Carlos Quintero

Almost two weeks ago something strange started to happen on my laptop: the next version of MZ-Tools that I am working on was taking almost 10 seconds to load, while usually loads in 1 or 2 seconds. Since I was working on some other complex tasks (unit testing of add-ins, satellite DLL for custom pictures […]

I have been noticing for years the presence of two strange files in the file system of my computers: pidpropsca.dll in C:\ pidca.dll in C:\Program Files Finally I decided today to investigate what they are, where they came from and more importantly, if I can delete them. I thought it would be easy searching on […]

Today there was a question in the MSDN Forum for Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) about adding a button to the toolbar (not to the context menu) of the Solution Explorer from a Visual Studio add-in. This is something that I am interested in too from time to time because I would like to move the […]

Comments Off on MZ-Tools Articles Series: PRB: Unable to add buttons to toolbars of toolwindows of Visual Studio from an add-in | Other | Permalink Posted by Carlos Quintero

I have updated once more one of the most popular articles that I have ever written to include information about Visual Studio 2010: INFO: Default .AddIn file locations for Visual Studio add-ins http://www.mztools.com/Articles/2008/MZ2008001.aspx This is a problematic area in Visual Studio extensibility that is increasingly complicated with each new Visual Studio version or Windows version: […]

I was intrigued about where Visual Studio was getting the languages to fill the Language combobox in the Tools, Options dialog, Environment, International Settings section. After some investigation I discovered that the list is not stored in the registry or in some file. Visual Studio just scans the subfolders of the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio […]

Comments Off on Visual Studio and the International Settings, Language combobox | Other | Permalink Posted by Carlos Quintero

The next version of my MZ-Tools add-in will target Visual Studio 2005, 2008 and 2010 so I can finally get rid of COM registration and native satellite DLLs and I can use a managed satellite DLL for custom pictures. I was using the “en-US” culture for the satellite DLL assembly and the same “en-US” name […]

Comments Off on The strange case of satellite DLL with culture ‘es-ES’ not found | Other | Permalink Posted by Carlos Quintero

The third article of the MZ-Tools Articles Series of this year is about testing add-ins in localized (international) versions of Visual Studio. It happens that most developers of the world are either native “English” or use English versions of Visual Studio and/or Windows, and therefore are not 100% aware of localizations that happen in the […]